Daily Life

Imagine walking the red carpet. Not many have had this experience. But guests to Rust en Vrede are made to feel that special — important, celebrated — as they walk along the long “red carpet” path leading the establishment

An Eastern Cape artist has blended Christian iconography, contemporary South African stories and AI in a bold exhibition of engaging pieces currently on exhibit in Cape Town.

Sometimes watching gardeners wield a spade makes you believe you are witnessing an execution. Especially if the spade blade is thrust into the soil too close to the plant. This is not a beheading. You are rather seeing important limbs, the source of the plants’ lifeblood, chopped off. These are the roots.

When her adult children left home, an Eastern Cape ceramicist Billie McNaughton sought solace in swimming and is now applauded for her whimsical swimming-cap-wearing ceramic heads.

I am clubbing this. Not waiting for anyone. Head down, pounding for the parking lot.

A new 200m stretch of ClearVu fence hugging the wall of iconic Orient Pier was defended as non-existent by Transnet’s East London port manager Sphiwe Mthembu.

Bushman’s River artist Dorothy du Plessis has expressed her artistry through textile design, mosaicking and painting, but her intense love of colour runs through them all.

Former newspaper journalist and editor, Waldimar Pelser turned a television side hustle into his full-time gig as the director of M-Net and premium channels, a role which also allows him to indulge in his love of film.

The waters off East London’s coast in the early 1940s were menaced by German submarines looking for Allied ships to sink. The Allies tactical response included the young women of the Special Signals Service (SSS) whose headquarters were in Cambridge. Secretly trained up as radar operators, the women monitored the ocean and the skies in a little-known era of the city’s history.

The sun rises cold and orange. The winter of our discord has finally begun. There is tragedy and there is art.

Don’t do it! Do-o-o-n ... and he does it! There we were, battling an epic, wild Eastern Cape river in post-climate fury flood, approaching 4km and 70 years old, and my compadre, The Peril, stops swimming and sticks out his thumb. Well it’s more of an entitled arm wave. Just hold this image in mind.

I sleep in the cosmos. Not really, but sort-of — it’s a playlist I have made on the modern music slavery algorithm, Spotify. What have I put onto play that is making my lilac-tinted grey morning so evocative of the social storms I sense around us? No it's not Zep or Parow or the Dead Kennedies, it’s Fred Chopin’s Prelude in E minor Opus 28 number 4.

The weather is bipolar today — a climate trend we knew was coming more than a decade ago — but the good news is that it should be OK over Easter. SAWS tells travellers to stay sharp, but the “rainfall will start to ease off in most parts of the country” and that Friday and Saturday will be great along the coast.

Out there it is dark. Lots of trumpeting and trampling. Our society is changing. I look for a sign. You know me, on that plastic bucket, parking off doing motorcycle maintenance — well, more of a ritual of putting on boots, pants, jacket. Taking the heffalump off its centre stand in the garage and rolling it out the garage in reverse.

“Is there any mayonnaise?” This question, accompanied with incredulity — on all sides — was asked in the wilderness. It referenced two slices of government white bread pinioning a few generous slices of thistle cheese crafted at the Brewery & Two Goats Deli in Nieu-Bethesda last week. But our loaned double-cab caravan of life has taken us far from there.